What is Ping?

The word PING is a computer term. It is a network message sent by a computer to notify the other computer/s. When it comes to blogging, this term is defined as a process of notifying the tracking services that a site has been updated.

How it works?

A ping service crawls your blog regularly for new updates. Whenever there is a new post for a particular blog that is being broadcast to the pinging service’s site.

Is it important?

Yes, very much important for a blog site. Pinging will tell your readers that there is a new blog post available for them to read. For those people who haven’t landed to your site, there is a chance that your new update will be read. So it means that you will increase traffic because your site will be visited and sooner or later you’ll increase your followers.

Who offers ping services?

After all that has been said, below is a list of ping services that will report to search engines that your blog has updated. All you have to do once you get to their site is to fill-out the necessary information such as your domain and submit to them then they will do the rest for you.

• Ping-o-matic
• Pingoat
• King Ping
• Blo.gs
• Blogflux
• Weblogs
• Autopinger – added by Yuwoncedric

I will add if I found new pinging sites. If you know a pinging site that is not listed here, let’s help each other and leave a comment here. Thanks!

Clicky
» gives bloggers and smaller web sites a more personal understanding of their visitors. It stands out with its refreshingly clean and simple interface, innovative features like Spy and RSS feeds, and an unrivaled per visitor level of detail. You also get real time stats, outbound link tracking, download tracking, IP tagging, custom data tracking, and much more.

Google Analytics
» helps you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. It makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting web sites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

Statcounter
» a free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

Sitemeter
» comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With our detailed reporting you’ll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more.

CrazyEgg
» is a unique service that provides graphical and text analysis of visitor behavior on your site. Yes, you can simply count page views, or IP addresses, but can you really use this information? You need to know where your visitors are clicking so that you can fine-tune your site’s performance. You can use Crazy Egg to experiment with this positioning until you find the right spot to improve the ad’s performance.

FeedBurner
» provides media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Its Web-based tools, including an extensive feed and blog advertising network, help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the Web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users. Google already acquired this service.

103bees
» It’s an online service for webmasters, bloggers and internet marketers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed real-time statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive targeted traffic to your websites. 103bees is an indispensable tool for SEO and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!

ClickTale
» is a hosted service, so there is no software to install. Setup takes less than five minutes. It shows you movies of visitors’ every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action.The ClickTale Heatmaps™ show what visitors look at inside your webpage and how far down they scroll.

Mybloglog
» very known as a social network for blogs. Anyhow the service also offers a listing of Top 10 links clicked on your site each day. They also provides Top 10 referrals to know where the site traffic is coming from.

GoStats
» packed with lots of great features, including information on page views, return visitors, and page popularity, this free hit counter is a quick and easy to use tool for determining how many people visit your website.

eWebCounter
» monitor who’s on your website with real-time streaming data. Track page views, unique visitors, visitor paths, referrals, search engine keywords. Get statistical reports emailed to you.

ShinyStat
» The free hit counter is intended only for personal and nonprofit use, and it can track up to 1,000 page views per day. The tracker is very easy to install, highly reliable and it satisfies the needs of non-professional users.

Snoop
» streams website and blog events to you live, in real-time. A dedicated asynchronous (non-polling) connection is maintained with Reinvigorate. You’ll know the instant someone makes a comment on your blog, posts in your forum, purchases an item, gets referred from another site, etc.. It features automatic integration with Name Tags so you’ll know exactly who your visitors are.

Enquisite
» They report on your website’s activity in the search engines. Complimentary to other web analytics tools, we provide you the information you can’t get elsewhere, in an easy to read and understand format.

My two cents:
I have been using Statcounter ever since but I found out that there are other free sites that offer better stats. I have been using Google Analytics but for some reason after I reboot mysite this month my stats were not working anymore, I should probably look for a time to fix it later, though definitely one of the best. Currently I’m so into Clicky because almost everything that I need is provided by this service. Once the trial is over after 21 days I will definitely upgrade my Free Plan to Professional Plan which is very much worth it.

How bout you what stats programs do you use and why? Did I miss a free analytics tool aside from the ones I have mentioned above? Leave a comment!